Arup is a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom which provides engineering, design, planning, project management and consulting services for all aspects of the built environment. The firm is present in Africa, the Americas, Australasia, East Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and has over 10,000 staff based in 92 offices across 37 countries. Arup has participated in projects in over 160 countries. Wikipedia.

Fibre optic sensors are used to monitor the integrity of a subsurface concrete structure such as a pile or diaphragm wall. A fibre optic sensor array (48) is attached to a reinforcement or framework assembly (20) for the subsurface concrete structure. Concrete is applied to surround the reinforcement or framework assembly (20) and fibre optic sensor array (48). The fibre optic sensor array (48) is then used to collect temperature data during hydration of the subsurface concrete structure. The temperature data is monitored in real time to determine differentials across the structure, indicative of a problem within the structure.

An air conditioning unit (2) comprises a main body (3) including an air inlet (24) and an air outlet (22), the main body (3) defining an airflow passage between the air inlet (24) and the air outlet (22). A fan (28) is disposed within the airflow passage and a thermal element (26) is disposed within the airflow passage upstream of the fan (28). The main body (3) has a front face exposed to a temperature controlled space (8), on which the air outlet is disposed, and the air inlet and thermal element are disposed around the periphery of the front face.

A modular bridge is formed from a plurality of bridge modules (4), the bridge (2) having a longitudinal direction along the spanning direction and including: a first longitudinal compression member (11,13, 70) that is, in use, at an upper part of the bridge cross-section; a second longitudinal compression member (9, 72) that is, in use, at a lower part of the bridge cross-section; a structural lateral element (9) for forming a deck of the bridge or for supporting deck elements of the bridge; a shear element (14, 16) for carrying a shear load; and a tension member (6) applying a compressive force to one of the longitudinal compression members (1,13, 70); (9, 72) such that when in use the other of the longitudinal compression members (1,13, 70); (9, 72) forms a main compression element for the bridge (2) and the tension member (6) forms a main tension element for the bridge (2). The bridge modules (4) form segments of the length of the bridge (2) and each bridge module (4) is of a one-piece construction, this single piece including: a segment (10, 12) of the first longitudinal (1) compression member of the bridge; a segment (8) of the second longitudinal compression member of the bridge; a segment (8) of the structural lateral element; and a segment (14, 16) of the shear element; and the bridge modules being arranged to support a portion of the tension member (6).

Heating consumption in the residential sector in Europe is around 2300 TWh/y, DHW consumptions reaches 500 TWh/y, while cooling consumption is less than 100 TWh/y. The construction sector offers unique opportunities to decarbonise the European economy. However, as the replacement rate of the existing stock is very small (1-1.5 % per year), acceleration is needed.
On top of this, the reorganisation of the sector poses tremendous challenges due to its extreme fragmentation: more than 50% of the residential buildings are owned by private single owners. Moreover, whilst few major industrial players are active on the market, it is largely dominated (more than 95%) by SMEs both on the manufacturers and the professionals side.
BuildHEAT addresses this challenging sector by:
- elaborating systemic packages for the deep rehabilitation of residential buildings
- developing innovative technologies facilitating the implementation of the renovation measures
- developing financial tools enabling large public and private investments
- involving the construction chain from the very beginning and all along the building life cycle.
A set of reliable, energy efficient and affordable retrofit solutions will be mad available, which execution is facilitated by industrialised, modular and flexible HVAC, faade and ICT systems developed.
Despite the affordability, innovative solutions are more expensive compared to off the shelf ones. Therefore financing models are needed to facilitate the massive entry to market of the new technologies. BuildHEAT aims to leverage large private investments by using European structural funds, thus promoting retrofit actions at quarter level.
Finally, BuildHEAT involves the entire construction chain from owners to professionals to investors in the retrofit process and all along the lifetime of the building, by addressing technical, behavioural, cultural and economic perspectives. In this way, awareness and involvement are triggered.

The growth of cities, impacts of climate change and the massive cost of providing new infrastructure provide the impetus for this proposal entitled Training in Reducing Uncertainty in Structural Safety (TRUSS) which will maximize the potential of infrastructure that already exists. If flaws in a structure can be identified early, the cost of repair will be vastly reduced, and here an effective monitoring system would allow identifying the optimum time to repair as well as improving structural safety. But safety is difficult to quantify and requires a deep understanding of the uncertainty associated to measurements and models for the structure and the loads. TRUSS will gather this understanding by bringing together an intersectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration between 4 Universities, 11 Industry participants and 1 research institute from 6 European countries. The consortium will combine and share expertise to offer training at an advanced level as new concepts for monitoring, modelling and reliability analysis of structures are emerging all the time. TRUSS will make knowledge of structural safety grow by incorporating these emerging technologies (hi-tech monitoring and manufacturing, computing, etc.) into the training programme and it will support job creation by enabling a wider talent pool of skilled and accredited engineering graduates with business, entrepreneurship, communication, project management and other transferrable skills. The training programme will be structured into taught modules combined with original research supported by secondments that will expose 14 fellows to both academia and industry. While developing tools that will reduce uncertainty in structural safety and improve infrastructure management, TRUSS will lay the basis for an advanced doctoral programme that will qualify graduates for dealing with the challenges of an aging European infrastructure stock, thereby enhancing their career prospects in both industry and academia.

Launching a European long-term ambition and initiative to increase the overall performance of multimodal transport infrastructures, the REFINET CSA intends to 1) create a sustainable network of European and international stakeholders representatives of all transport modes and transport infrastructure sectors, 2) deliver a shared European vision of how to specify, design, build or renovate, and maintain the multimodal European transport infrastructure network of the future along with innovative processes so as to enhance the effectiveness of the sector, and 3) elaborate a Strategic Implementation Plan with a comprehensive set of prioritised actions to made the REFINET vision a reality as well as providing private and public decision makers with a set of up-to-date recommendations and guidelines (including good practices and lessons learnt) for strategic actions and required levels of cooperation between all stakeholders. REFINET will consider two complementary scenarios, namely maintenance and upgrading of existing transport infrastructures, and development of new transport infrastructures. REFINET will contribute to create a European-wide consensus on where to focus in terms of research and innovation to improve the productivity of the assets (reducing maintenance costs, extending the life span) and reduce drastically traffic disruptions of transport flows from inspection, construction and maintenance activities, and to accommodate increasing/changing traffic demand. Thus, REFINET will pave the way to enhanced technology integration and transfer and mass-market development for innovative materials, components, systems and processes supporting the pan-European generalisation of advanced multimodal infrastructures, handling the demand within various industrial sectors and help match the EU-2020 Strategy, and achieve goals of main stakeholders. The REFINET consortium is made of 8 partners from 5 European countries (Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, United Kingdom).

The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme encourages uptake of renewable heat technologies in the UK to support the ambition of 12% of the heating coming from renewable sources by 2020, and solar energy is one of the forms of renewable energy that has great potential. The amount of solar radiation incident on the roof of a typical home exceeds its energy consumption over a year. However, the longstanding barriers to the utilisation of solar thermal energy technology lie in the noticeable miss-match between energy supply and demand. The Heat-STRESS project aims to deliver the maximum benefits of solar thermal energy by means of short-term (diurnal) and long-term (seasonal) thermal energy storage and thermochemical heat transformer technology to significantly reduce energy demands for individual and/or multiple residential buildings, such as a local community or multi-storey development. The concept proposes to significantly advance phase change material (PCM) storage and thermochemical technology in a holistic system such that it has the potential to provide both a technically and economically viable solution.
With sensible heat storage systems, the storage volumes required will be large and difficult to integrate into existing domestic dwellings. The latent heat storage has higher energy density than sensible heat system, and thermal-chemical thermal storage has much higher energy density than latent heat. Moreover, thermochemical sorption technologies seldom suffers from long-term heat loss and provide a preferable option for solar seasonal energy storage, i.e. using excess solar heat collected in the summer to compensate for the heat supply insufficiency during the winter time. One of the significant advantages of a thermochemical sorption system is that it is inherently an integrated heat pump and energy storage system. It is a pure heat-driven heat pump cycle and the heat source can be the seasonally stored solar energy, which would provide the potential to avoid electricity or gas use and off-peak grid loading resulting from the deployment of integrated air and ground source heat pumps, electric boiler, gas boiler and storage technology currently being developed. The thermal transformation provides the opportunity to upgrade heat, which may be suitable for domestic heating, so that it can provide higher temperature domestic hot water.
The Heat-STREES project is aiming at a new high level of cutting-edge technologies despites with lower Technology Readiness Level. It should be envisaged with long-term vision: one of imperative measures to realise decarbonisation and to cut energy bills is to avoid the conventional generated electricity and gas consumption due to the continuously increasing demands, aggravating energy poverty and the forthcoming strengthened carbon taxes. In order to tap all appealing potential of thermal-chemical sorption and PCM thermal storage to make contribution for a better advanced world, more immediate collective efforts from both academia and industries is required to address important research issues.

The increasing demand for complex infrastructure projects in density populated areas represents a major challenge for the construction industry, especially in view of the intimate interaction between construction activities and urban living. Modern society is pressing for innovative technical solutions to eliminate the safety, quality, environmental and management risks related to underground works.
Diaphragm Walls are the retaining structure of choice for many of the most complex deep-foundation projects. Forming quality joints between the individual diaphragm wall panels is identified as the most significant weakness of the current process. Existing jointing techniques were designed for walls to 30m deep; modern diaphragm walls are typically significantly deeper. Beyond 30m, the options available are either technically and environmentally poor, or increasingly problematic, leading to sub-standard, defective joints.
Foundation experts at CCMJ Systems have invented and patented the TTMJ (Tension Track Milled Joint) system which addresses the demand for a better diaphragm wall joint. This innovative new system offers the possibility to construct perfect joints to any depth irrespective of actual panel verticality. In addition it also allows for further innovation such as tension connections not currently possible.
TREVI, CCMJ Systems and Arup have teamed up to complete development of the TTMJ system from present status to ready for market. ARUP is the leading specifier of diaphragm walling projects worldwide, CCMJ Systems is the inventor, TREVI will lead the team and is vastly experienced deep foundations specialist with a global presence.
The expected outcome is a fully-functional and validated joint system providing a step change in diaphragm wall quality; ready for use across the deep foundations market.

UK Autodrive - Milton Keynes leading the way in partnership with Coventry and the motor industry is a large programme of work aimed at exploring and demonstrating the potential for autonomous vehicles to become part of our everyday lives. The programme, which involves the demonstration of road-going cars and lightweight self-driving pods designed for pedestrianised spaces, will be delivered on behalf of the UK by the City of Milton Keynes working in association with the City of Coventry. The partners in the programme include JLR, Tata, Ford, RDM, Thales (UK), AXA, Wragge-Lawrence-Graham, Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Open University, and the new Transport Systems Catapult. Consulting group Arup has devised the programme and will provide programme management and technical co-ordination skills.